Authoritatively Bad Oldman

Posted by Mike Finnegan
on
February 03, 2017

This year
the chameleon-like Gary Oldman will traffic in authority figures. This summer
he plays a sinister dictator in the action comedy The Hitman’s Bodyguard, due in August and starring the promising
team of Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson. At year’s end he’ll be seen taking
on the towering role of Winston Churchill in director Joe Wright’s historical
World War II drama Darkest Hour, which
also features the late, great John Hurt as Churchill’s predecessor as British
Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Today he arrives on movie screens
nationwide as a visionary and caring NASA scientist trying to save fugitive
teenager Asa Butterfield, the first human being born on the planet Mars, whose
journey back to our planet threatens his life in the romantic science-fiction
adventure The Space Between Us. This
diverse array of characters is far removed from the gritty,
establishment-tweaking succession of roles three decades ago in which he first gut-grabbed
our attention in Sid and Nancy
(1986), Prick Up Your Ears (1987), The Firm (1989) and his reckless
Manhattan Irish gangster in State of Grace(1990, a Twilight Time Blu-ray title). Twenty-three years ago
tomorrow marks the U.S. opening of a wildly careening neo-noir crime caper in
which he was also gloriously bad to the bone: Romeo Is Bleeding (1993).
Director Peter Medak was coming off two bracing real-life criminal sagas, The Krays (1990) and Let Him Have It (1991), and decided to
pull all out the stops with this outlandish study of corruption and carnality (scripted
by Fatal Beauty and Road House co-writer Hilary Henkin) that
cast Oldman in glamorously scummy company as amoral NYPD detective Jack
Grimaldi, who’d just as much break as enforce the law in service of Mafia boss
Roy Scheider, to whom he leaks the secret identities of Witness Protection
informants for hefty cash payments. That Grimaldi has no scruples when it comes
to two-timing his wife (Annabella Sciorra) and mistress (Juliette Lewis)
positions him for a big-time fall. In true noir fashion, the instrument of that
pending doom comes in the sexy, steely form of a psychotic lady Russian
assassin who’s a thorn in the side of both the law and the mob: the brash and
beautiful Mona Demarkov, mightily incarnated by an actress who could steal a
scene lock, stock and gun barrel from Oldman, the splendid Lena Olin, who’d
previously slain audiences by her blazing performances in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and Enemies: A Love Story (1989). Their scenes together – including a
brazenly violent sequence involving gunplay, wire strangulation,
testicle-grabbing, handcuffs, leg-locking suffocation, all in a speeding car –
are a white-hot wonder. One of the film’s few defenders, Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, reveled in it: “Wait
till you get a load of this babe from hell in scenes that are sure to put the
gorgeously lurid Romeo Is Bleeding on the Moral
Majority's shit list. The rest of us – those who believe it's children and not
adults who need protection from movie mayhem – will be too busy relishing the
riveting fireworks display from Olin and Oldman in this scorcher of a thriller.
Director Peter Medak keeps the action stylish, sexy and fiendishly funny. The
film rarely makes a lick of sense, but it's compulsively watchable. Behind the
guns, gross-outs, high heels and hard-ons, there's a subversive wit at play. It will be a shame if audiences
don’t get the joke….This is a nutso movie of splendid
excess, from the hallucinatory gleam of Dariusz Wolski's cinematography to the
throbbing pulse of Mark Isham's music. Screw the moral watchdogs; Romeo is terrific, twisted fun.” Today
and later in 2017, you can revel in Oldman facing down menacing government forces,
Reynolds, Jackson and Adolf Hitler. For now, experience how he mishandles one
of the screen’s iciest femme fatales ever, when taking a out-of-control ride
with Romeo
Is Bleeding on TT hi-def Blu-ray.